Black holes may be heavy, but in the vast majority of cases they're really small. A stellar-mass black hole is only a few kilometers wide, which seems large if you're standing right next to it, but on an astronomical scale that's a pinpoint. Actually hitting one is a lot harder than it looks in SpaceEngine - due to the strength of its gravity, on approach you'll accelerate continuously until you reach enormous speed, and unless your aim is flawless (which it isn't), by the time you're anywhere near it your orbital speed will be enormous, effectively creating a massive centrifugal force that just flings you away on your space journey. This very effect is why it's impractical to try to shoot garbage into the Sun.

Magnetars are a much scarier story. A magnetar can kill you from 1000km away, even if you're inside an armored spacecraft. At that distance its magnetic field is so strong that electrons can't trace circular orbits around atomic nuclei, causing atoms to assume the shapes of toothpicks, thus becoming unable to form bonds and rendering all chemistry impossible. And a magnetar's magnetic poles tend to blast out focused beams of radiation, which unlike a black hole's, end up pointing out sideways and spinning around like a giant space lightsaber, killing anything that gets caught in the beam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar I'd be much more afraid of running into a magnetar than a black hole ;P

And also, magnetars are a subtype of neutron star, which even though aren't black holes, those things can reel you in just as quickly as a low-end black hole.

Living among the stars, I find my way. I grow in strength through knowledge of the space I occupy, until I become the ruler of my own interstellar empire of sorts. Though The world was made for the day, I was made for the night, and thus, the universe itself is within my destiny.

This Star might not be a black hole yet, but it is a White Dwarf that is turning into a black hole and is next to a black hole. Name: RSC 0-0-0-558-1031-0-0-0 S13 Type: White dwarf Diameter 16768.271 km

Go to it and look up and you will see another black hole, in the center of the galaxy. Far far away from the Milky way.

ronnyvaltonen, how massive was it? I can't go to it, your coordinates bring me to a supermassive black hole, and I ca't find a white dwarf anywhere in the vicinity. I want to run a sim of it in Universe Sandbox^2 to see if it is in fact turning into a black hole or not, somehow...

Living among the stars, I find my way. I grow in strength through knowledge of the space I occupy, until I become the ruler of my own interstellar empire of sorts. Though The world was made for the day, I was made for the night, and thus, the universe itself is within my destiny.

I have to admit that I have a littke fear of black holes. Using Space Engine, I entered inside a black hole and... only blackness. But hey, I saw something! Like what, anti-space?

Look at this:

A black hole with 3 planets!

Approaching the black monster.

Near the black monster the space start to distort, as if the stars appear to fall inside the black hole or as if we were entering a hole in space (as if we were inside a kind of sphere or in the bottom of space).

How the universe would look inside a black hole, according to Space Engine. It's as if we were now in an antispace, where the space is like a true sphere and the antispace around it is nothing but nothingness... As if the universe were inside a sphere.

Would you feel fear if you were inside a black hole?

Imagine being trapped there forever seeing the universe that way! Bye bye universe...

Yes, but only if I were inside one, or on a trajectory into one without the delta-V to alter that path into a stable orbit.

Heck - if all I had was stable-orbit Delta-V, I'd still be scared. I'd be scared on an interplanetary journey within our own solar system if something put me off course beyond my ability to recover. I'd be scared in any situation where I didn't have adequate radiation protection, or the means to get to the next place where I could replenish my vital resources.

But just looking at black holes? No, that doesn't scare me. It gives me a strange feeling trying to comprehend them, but not fear. I think they're magnificent - and so do all of you, or you wouldn't have sought them out, wouldn't have found any, and wouldn't have had reason to feel fear.

How the universe would look inside a black hole, according to Space Engine.

You're not inside it. Close, but not quite. :)

QuoteDiakonov ()

Would you feel fear if you were inside a black hole?

Probably not. I'd be too busya) wondering why I'm inside a black holeb) taking in and trying to comprehend the visualsc) wondering whether I will be killed by tidal forces, mass inflation instability, or something else. This might give me insight as to what a real black hole's interior structure is, assuming I have enough time to really think about it before it kills me. d) regretting that I'd be unable to share any of it with anyone. =(

No, it just looks that way. The black hole is below you; you are just above its horizon, looking up. Your camera is accelerating upwards really fast in order to stay in one place against the gravity, so this warps your field of view, shrinking the outside universe to a smaller area, and the darkness of the hole seems to envelop you. The effect is very much the same as this:

This is a view of a famous da Vinci drawing, seen at nearly the speed of light. The drawing is behind us. Relativistic effects stretch it into our field of view, and everything in front of us is concentrated and blueshifted in the center. Think of the drawing as the black disk of the hole, and the bright blue spot is the outside universe.(Image source)

Welcome to the strangeness of black holes and relativity! They are very counter-intuitive!

Perhaps SpaceEngineer should install some kind of signal. For example, let flash the screen. Or a message on the screen - You're dead ! .Of course, only if the horizon is exceeded - otherwise lacked any excitement.

4. It's where r/rg=1, z=infinity, and your altitude is zero. (So I'm actually a few meters above it in the screenshot, but that's as close as it allows. And the universe is a single pixel.)

Think of it like this: Black holes are waterfalls made up of space, with the space all cascading inward to a point. The event horizon is the special boundary where the space is flowing inward at the speed of light. So the only way to maintain your position there is to be constantly moving outward against the flow, also at the speed of light.

So now think of what it's like when you are in a car going down the highway in a rainstorm. Notice the raindrops splatter very hard on the front windshield, but hardly anything hits the back. Its as if the raindrops are hitting you faster and at an angle. This effect is aberration, and it happens to photons in relativity. If you're near the horizon, moving really fast to avoid being pulled in, you're plowing through the rain of photons around you. This makes them all appear to come from a very intense (blueshifted) and very tiny point directly above you. The darkness of the black hole seems to totally envelop you.

It is a rather scary visual experience, isn't it? I'm always awestruck and somewhat unnerved by it.